Spreadsheets are very flexible and provide a user with an ability to model many different types of calculations with user defined formulas. Spreadsheets are widely accepted as a financial planning tool and have become a financial language utilizing a cryptic row/column/operator structure that has evolved to be its own standard. For example, a majority of users/companies use EXCEL (EXCEL is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation) spreadsheets for financial budgeting and forecasting. Spreadsheets allow a user to model many different types of calculations, and therefore financial forecasts may be based on discrete formulas and drivers contained in a spreadsheet. However, as a company continues to grow in size, spreadsheets that contain the company's financial budgets and forecasts also continue to grow in size and it is not uncommon for larger companies to have spreadsheet files exceeding 100 megabytes in size.
In addition to large spreadsheet files, a company may have countless individual spreadsheets that are linked together to manage a financial model. Currently, to manage a financial model with linked spreadsheets, each individual linked spreadsheet is dependent on specific coordinates that are shared by other applicable linked spreadsheets with respect to, for example, terms, rows, columns, and tabs within a spreadsheet. However, as changes are made to each individual spreadsheet regarding, for example, terms, rows, columns, and tabs, these changes should be updated in each applicable linked spreadsheet as well, otherwise cell errors occur.
In addition, because spreadsheets are a personal productivity tool that are not meant to model an entire organization, several problems exist when managing a financial model with multiple linked spreadsheets as described above. For example: 1) spreadsheets only provide a two dimensional representation of “n” dimensional financial and operational modeling space (“n” dimensional space represented by customers, products, sales channels, accounts, departments, and the like); 2) a spreadsheet model made up of multiple linked spreadsheets requires a user/modeler to open, calculate, and save each spreadsheet when a driver is changed; 3) a spreadsheet only allows a presentation of data and an input of data in two dimensions; 4) a spreadsheet is unique to a developer of the spreadsheet; and 5) spreadsheets that are configured to solve a same problem may look totally different.